Canada school boards accuse social media firms of ‘rewiring’ how kids think

In recent years, educators have spend a growing share of their time in the classroom attempting to get students to focus, the boards said. Photograph: Monkey Business Images/Rex/Shutterstock

Four of Canada’s largest school boards have launched a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the social media companies Meta, Snap Inc and ByteDance, accusing them of acting in a “high-handed, reckless, malicious, and reprehensible manner” with products the boards claim harm student learning and “rewire” how children think.

The four district boards – Ottawa-Carleton, Toronto, Peel and Toronto Catholic – filed four separate statements of claim in Ontario’s superior court of justice on Wednesday.